Get the most up-to-date read on how the nation feels about Christmas

Even after a Black Friday boost Christmas spend still looks under pressure – not helped by a trying election slap bang in the middle of festivities! Discover how the nation feels right now, how plans and spending are materialising and how the Christmas trading battle looks set to pan out as we enter the last crucial week!

In report 3 we analyse the feelings and behaviours of 2,000 UK consumers to reveal the 6 big stories you need to know about right now.

What do I get?

You get a story-led report, written by our senior insight experts, which will arm you with winning strategies. We’ve combined survey data analysis, qualitative research and social intelligence to give you the big picture and the smallest details on how Christmas is shaping up and what people want as we enter the final week of spending.

You really don’t want to miss this analysis of how the nation’s emotions are impacting Christmas 2019 vs. last year – including:

• Why the Black Friday ‘monster’ is hard to slay
• How consumers really feel right now and what this means for the last week of Christmas spend
• The moments, experiences and brands with the winning formula to make us spend
• One month on from being released which adverts are sticking in the heads and hearts of the nation
• A sneak peak at 2020 – why it’s a chance to form new habits around healthier living and mental wellbeing

How much?

• Report 3 is only £3,950 for over 40 slides of insights and recommended strategies.
• Reports 1, 2 and 4 are also charged at only £3,950 each.
• Or you can get all 4 reports for just £11,500! (saving you £4,000)

A drop in the ocean for social media

Whilst these campaigns and initiatives from financial services are admirable, we can’t help but wonder how impactful they can be against a backdrop of influencers flaunting their recent buys. Of course we all know the truth, that influencers are paid to represent brands, or get much of their talked-about purchases ‘gifted’. But that’s easily forgotten when scrolling through endless enviable images and a sense of community and support which tricks us into believing it could all be real.

The big message which cuts through loud and clear is **spend more** – either just by buying more, or by opting for products and experiences that are a cut-above your preferred price point.

The quieter, but no less harmful and damaging message is “this could happen to you too one day”. These influencers have ordinary lives, with few special skills or experience – just a great camera and a very patient room mate or partner to play photographer. Their lives changed quickly – almost overnight they have more money, gifts and status than they could have dreamed. This leaves followers thinking “why couldn’t that be me?” The possibility that a better selfie, with improved airbrushing and a slightly more aspirational setting could help anyone bag a £1,000 per post deal.  And this ‘one day’ dreaming makes saving a little a month feel futile.

Fight back

We believe a social media revolution of some kind is coming – consumers are more readily seeing through these faux fairy tales. But financial services can’t rely on and wait for the consumer to rise up.

Their best bet is to more effectively tap into consumer emotions. Social media moments play into a sensation of Desire and Freedom. It’s a combination of excitement and anticipation mixed with a burst of energy we feel when doing new or different things. This is a really powerful sensation; a feeling of a transformed and slightly better you. The feeling puts greater weight on the end result – it helps us counteract hyperbolic discounting. It’s this sensation that drags teenagers out of bed for driving lessons; makes ordinary people work until the early hours on their side hustle; helps families embark on weeks of disruption to achieve their dream kitchen extension and encourages the worst with money to save up for designer sunnies.

We believe the next savings mechanics should play to that powerful sensation; ditch the fear and making it over-easy. Create some FOMO. Use social differently. Find a way to make savings as irresistible as the Instagram like button.

Join our latest event to see the big consumers trends of 2020

Previously loved stories fall flat

We’re increasingly being tempted by niche, exciting start-ups – think of a coffee van by the station; a gourmet burger stand at a Christmas market, or even farmers’ market delivery boxes. The rules of trust are being re-written, as it’s no longer so important to have an impressive back story, having served customers for over 100 years. Now, we seek care, discerning selection and passion. What these entrepreneurs’ stories lack in heritage, they make up for in obsession.

Put nit-picking aside, perception is reality

It feels unfair after all, no one can feed a family from Greggs, buy every meal from Deliveroo or replace a good cup of tea with a menu of hot drinks to rival the nearest too-trendy-for-its-own-good coffee house. But this is customer perception, and rarely is it all that fair. The important, and unfortunate thing is for customers, perception is reality. They’ll complain about quality they previously thought was great, not because the supermarket has altered its ingredients, but because their notion of good quality has been reimagined.

Up the ante, like you mean it

All this pressure on supermarkets, and yet the biggest message we hear over and over – aside from lowering prices – is ‘making shopping easy’. And easy is good, of course it is, we see so many brands triumph by making life easy. But we can’t help but wonder if this is enough? In a sector with so many pressures, and with so much innovation already in the crusade to be ‘easy’, can this really cut through?

Charm distinctively or live invisibly

We believe it’s the feel-good moments and the memorable ones that make the difference: an incredible product, an inspiring idea, an immersive experience. Of course, almost always, these come with enormous operational challenges – the trick is to spot the ones worth the headache, rather than avoiding them all in the guise of simplicity and ease. Don’t bother asking customers what they want, they’ll ask for a nicer chair in the café, and it won’t change a thing. Instead, understanding what makes customers feel good and build ideas from there.

Source: Waitrose & Partners

Source: Aldi

Source: Iceland

More than ever, Christmas and all of its surrounding celebrations are taking place at home. In a world where we seek experiences over things, and photos for Instagram above anything else, there’s naturally a role for immersive food and drink. But we predict that, as a tough and turbulent year draws to a close, we’ll look for comfort in tradition, in crowd-pleasers that bring us together with simple pleasures.

Rather than over-innovated products, we predict those which more closely represent loved traditions will win.  Some gentle twists on a favourite will, granted, be popular. We’ll also find newness by discovering traditions from overseas – Aldi and Lidl in particular will help us there. The biggest messages we predict will gain attention by delivering innovation via specialness – messages of premium ingredients and quality techniques will cut through. This year the battle for best pudding won’t lie in a hidden orange, but the amount of alcohol and length of time maturing. Lidl looks set to win, matured for 24 months but we doubt you’ll be able to make a killing with it on eBay though.

Well we knew it was looking tough, but this is surprising…..! Discover how the nation feels right now, their Christmas spending plans and how the Black Friday battle looks set to pan out. Get the comprehensive view on consumers’ reaction to all the big Christmas ads and see if your brand is really hitting the spot in terms of driving feel-good and memorability.

In report 2 we analyse the feelings and behaviours of 4,000 UK consumers to reveal the 6 big stories you need to know about right now.

What do I get?

You get a story-led report, written by our senior insight experts, which will arm you with winning strategies. We’ve combined survey data analysis, qualitative research and social intelligence to give you the big picture and the smallest details on how Christmas is shaping up and what people want.

You really don’t want to miss this analysis of how the nation’s emotions are impacting Christmas 2019 vs. last year – including:

• How consumers really feel right now and what this means for Christmas plans
• Predicted spend and what’s driving it
• Christmas celebrations and intentions
• The battle of Black Friday – reactions and intentions to the big event
• Overall reaction to the big Christmas ads – self-indulgent or want more?!
• Underlying themes to the winning and losing Christmas ads
• Where each of the big ads sit on our Boom! Framework – designed to assess feel-good and memorability

How much?

• Report 2 is only £3,950 for over 40 slides of insights and recommended strategies.
• Reports 1, 3 and 4 are also charged at only £3,950 each.
• Or you can get all 4 reports for just £11,500! (saving you £4,000)

Each report is based on a sample of 2,000 nat. rep UK consumers plus qualitative interviews throughout the Christmas period.

What do reports 3 and 4 cover?

Parts 3-4 will capture consumers’ feelings, wants and actions at the next 2 critical stages in the Christmas journey. See more detail below:

Didn’t get to Food Matters Live this year? Fear not. Here’s our ten minutes read of the interesting bits we saw and heard.

Sustainability the queen of the show

Consumer demand for more sustainable food and drink options was a big driving force of developments. Momentum around vegan and plant-based options continues – with a massive one third of brands and innovations presented connecting to this trend. Along with an abundance of free-from alternatives, vegetarian options and plastic-free inventions. The UK has never watched what’s happening in the sustainability space as much as today, and as for most innovations it often starts with easy food swaps. Once you start realising the amount of meat you eat and the amount of plastic covering what you buy you can’t turn back. So you turn to easy solutions that make you feel good whilst doing good.

Realising the health benefits of raw ingredients

There’s now a vast number of brands injecting ingredients to give us all that ‘health boost’ we’re keen to feel without doing the hard work! Turmeric and apple cider vinegar were the stars of the show. Obviously apple cider vinegar can’t cure major disease, but there is a great desire to move away from over the counter medication to more natural solutions to cure small illnesses. With the growing lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies, consumers will undoubtedly turn to more raw ingredients from their kitchens for simple health hacks at home.

Consumers expect transparency in everything

More than just knowing whether the packaging is recyclable or not, consumers increasingly demand clarity on the whole supply chain. And smaller, more innovative brands are doing an excellent job at being transparent on their whole supply chain process than the super brands. So beware! Consumers won’t be fooled and are likely to have more and more demanding expectations in the future.

Immersion in more ‘human’ brand stories

Food hasn’t felt like sustenance for at least a decade. With the growing importance of food in our lifestyles, our health, and even our Instagram accounts, consumers will expect to connect with the food they buy on a deeper, more personal level. It’s about looking good and feeling good. We met a carpenter from Wales who, after suffering from arthritis for years, got convinced by the benefits of turmeric and decided to launch his own health drink to cure it using only using local ingredients. He made recipes for years in his own garage before he got the right balance between taste and health benefits. These are the sort of powerful stories consumers want to get immersed in.

Packaging can’t be left till last!

We know from working with many brands that when it comes to packaging, a good intention to improve often doesn’t result in radical enough change. Packaging is the shop window of your product. When done well, packaging has the power to grab consumers’ attention and disrupt their automatic shopping mode. But when left to the end of the innovation pipeline or with little end user input that’s when poor sales and even consumer backlash can happen. For example, Mr Kipling moved to more individually packaged cake bars recently, but in doing so doubled the amount of plastic on their packaging. The resulting backlash was strong! Brands should put just as much effort into thinking about how their packaging design connects to consumer motivations as they do for what’s inside.

See how to develop winning products and packaging

We invited some of our clients with the most senior and demanding roles in insight to discuss the challenge of using insight to drive action – here’s the inside track on their toolkit.

Back yourself

Be the initiator! It could be that no one else in the business is talking about something you have identified as important yet. Your deep customer knowledge, firmly rooted in data and fresh insights, gives you an unrivalled ability to challenge thinking and spot chances for this understanding to add real value. Maximise the impact of insight updates by leading the decision on which hot topics to pursue. Projects begun, owned and driven by insight teams are often the most talked about and powerful.

Influence the influencers

Optimise your talent for bringing teams together, uniting work streams and tuning into different cultures, needs and wants. Sharpen your antennae for picking up on the questions that face each part of the organisation – so that your expertise can gain traction amongst stakeholders and shape decisions. Here your personality could be a big part of gaining influence!

Play to their biases

Note stakeholders’ irrational biases as you do customers’. We all have them! Use learnings from the field of behavioural economics to grab attention and persuade them to act. For example: making things as easy as possible, or evoking a sense of FOMO.

Show them the money

Showcase the commercial opportunity or risk. Putting a £-value next to problems and solutions always grabs attention! Use multiple data sources whenever you can as this means predictions about an action’s commercial benefits are more likely to be accurate and believed.

Design meetings to pack a punch

Stimulate talk and collaboration with pre-reads that don’t have to be reads! Instead ask your audience to pre-watch or pre-listen via video or podcasts. Allow time and space for discussion. And, of course, for longer sessions the magic ingredients are a nice room, good coffee and cakes!

Make it accessible

Keep things simple. If you stick to 1 – 2 big messages or a small range of bite-sized updates your work has far more chance of being remembered. Making customer data and resources easily accessible is a must.

Sign up to our latest webinar – how to start with emotions to build winning propositions

Growth is hard. It takes effort. However, we all want it – we’re programmed to seek improvements and make progress. But wanting to improve and actually improving are two very different things. The second requires action.

Obvious? In reality, we often get overwhelmed by the ‘big picture’ of what needs doing or distracted by the drumbeat of the everyday. A work deadline trumps going to that dance class you’ve signed up for. A cheeky gin (or three) is more appealing than cooking some healthy meal that’s supposed to take 20 minutes but consumes a whole evening.

Growth for brands is even harder. It relies on lots of people acting together. Often a huge workforce of field managers and head office stakeholders will need to combine to achieve any change.

So how can we encourage action?

Empowerment is key. It’s a word we hear often these days, but it’s true that if we feel empowered and believe we’ll succeed, we’re much more likely to take the action needed to grow. Within two years of Roger Bannister running the world’s first four-minute mile, 37 other athletes had done the same. What changed? Bannister proved it was possible and so others started to believe they could do it too. For brands, the notion holds true – belief drives action and success breeds success.

And this is where the magic happens – when we take even the smallest action, this success reinforces our self-belief, which in turn encourages us to take more action.

Programmes meant to track progress towards growth targets should focus on empowering teams to act on opportunities. However, they often do the opposite. CX studies brought in to be ‘the eyes of the customer’ spot granular pain points but, in doing so, take this role away from managers – implying they can’t be relied on. Far from empowering!

Four ways our CX programmes empower teams to act

1. Knowledge. For teams to feel empowered they need to be equipped with the right knowledge. And because people learn best by doing rather than being shown, Kokoro goes beyond just telling frontline teams their results. As well as real-time access to KPIs and suggested actions, our activation packs use a range of creative techniques to equip teams with knowledge on how to win hearts and create memories – and why both are important!

2. Gratitude. Celebrating success and showing gratitude are great ways to engage teams and empower action. Happy colleagues = happy customers. Our inspiring portal noticeboards help via videos that showcase great service, shout outs that recognise efforts and competitions which engage teams in celebrating successes.

3. Accountability. For Head Office, we don’t only deliver clear insights and pinpoint opportunities to improve the experience at a brand level. Our activation workshops and customer boards take things to the next level. Together with the brand we identify quick wins and effective actions, and remover barriers to delivery. The result: prioritised next steps, accountability and stakeholders who enjoy that vital feeling of empowerment. The virtuous circle is formed. Change happens.

4. Freedom. Whilst playing safe doesn’t always lead to disaster, it rarely brings the innovative, visionary moments linked with true growth. Our portals not only encourage teams to embrace feedback, they are also designed to be a safe space where those closest to the customer can give feedback and share ideas for improvements.

Find out more about our CX programmes here.

Emotions are at play in all of these moments – so why, when we start thinking about new experiences, evolved offers or a step-change in the experience, do we start with rational factors?

The common problem for brands is that even if they are aware of the power of emotions, when they start to make big decisions – say about the development of a new proposition – they default to rational factors. This is often about the concrete features and benefits; things the business can be sure it is either delivering or not. When these are tested, the questions asked tend to invite rational evaluations. Results are then biased towards options that tick these boxes. The trouble is, when the product hits the shelves it isn’t judged in this way at all. The feel of it trumps the think and sales predictions made on the back of the findings are likely to be inaccurate.

The more effective way is to start with emotions customers want to feel, and design to this. If a brand creates something that chimes instinctively it can, over time, persuade someone to build that rational narrative which satisfies them they’re making wise rather than flaky decisions. Our 5Drivers model helps unlock moments which are otherwise difficult to articulate. We can explore new ideas, starting with feelings, and then test implicitly – a far more telling way of getting to perceptions than asking “why do you like it?”

At initial ideation or co-creation – start with feelings, not lists of possible features. Our 5Drivers model helps consider emotions which don’t come to mind fast, like being energised by new things (Freedom), or the sensation of escape to a new world (Immersion).

The explosive truth about consumer emotions – download our thought piece now

Get prepared. This Christmas is looking tough. See just how tough, and discover the tactics that will win, in the first of our Christmas Unwrapped reports.

Report 1, a close look at people’s early planning, fears and wish-lists,  is hot off the press. We’ve analysed the feelings and behaviours of 2,000 UK consumers to reveal 5 macro trends that have huge implications for many brands this Christmas.

What do I get?

You get a story-led report, written by our senior insight experts, which will arm you with winning strategies. We’ve combined survey data analysis, qualitative research and wider behavioural trends to give you the big picture and the smallest details on how Christmas is shaping up and what people want.

You really don’t want to miss this analysis of how the nation’s emotions are changing Christmas 2019 vs. last year – including:

• The big dreams and concerns for the season
• How consumers want to feel at Christmas
• How uncertainty, especially around Brexit, is hitting plans
• What Christmas planning is underway and why
• Predicted spend and what’s driving it
• % of gift buying underway and the winning/losing categories
• Christmas activities planned and their likely effect on buying behaviour
• If it’s all about staying in vs. going out; a home-made Christmas vs. bought-in ease
• How wellbeing and environmental anxieties are impacting plans
• What it means to host Christmas in 2019

How much?

• Report 1 is only £3,950 for over 40 slides of insights and recommended strategies.
• Reports 2, 3 and 4 are also charged at only £3,950 each.
• Or you can get all 4 reports for just £11,500! (saving you £4,000)

Each report is based on a sample of 2,000 nat. rep UK consumers plus qualitative interviews throughout the Christmas period.

What do reports 2,3 and 4 cover?

Parts 2-4 will capture consumers’ feelings, wants and actions at the next 3 key points in the Christmas journey. See more detail below: